Monday, November 4, 2013

From MNO to GNO

I've really been missing my monthly Moms' Night Out. For the past 8 years, getting together with the women in my mother's group has been a touchstone in my mothering experience and in my life in general.

It's been a hard adjustment to not have substantive friends here and to also not have this touchstone anymore.

I was pretty blue this past Friday so I asked the girls if they wanted to have a Girls Night Out with me. Ramona needed tenni-runners (what the PE teacher calls sneakers) so we headed out to the fancy indoor mall. We did a little shopping for shoes and church dresses and we ate dinner in the food court.

At the end of the night they were both complaining that they had to buy dresses and they were worried that they would miss out in their nightly 22 minutes of tv. I don't think it meant as much to them as it did to me, and while I'm not going to become the sort of mother that tries to be her daughter's BFF, it was still pretty cool that we can just hop in the car and go spontaneously.

And as much as I enjoyed their company, I still missed my regular companions from the first Friday of the month.

I tried setting up an MNO here but it soon went from monthly, to quarterly, to almost a year goes by now! It's been hard to get already-set-in-their-routine mothers to buy in ... in DC we all started when we all had no clue at the same time.

I have done some GNO's but I find they actually cost more than the MNO's ever did (because they involve a movie or clothes, then food, then treats) - still lots of fun though.